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enterprises, as well as public and private
clouds.

Actifio
virtualizes copies of data, using the same copy for backup and disaster recovery instead of
requiring separate applications and devices for different data sets. PAS 5 includes improved deduplication
and multi-tenancy, a new way to
handle test/dev data, and an Enterprise Manager which features expanded reporting
functionality.

Actifio made its
multi-tenancy more granular, enabling customers to separate data by sub-groups so they can set
datastores for departments or user groups inside of larger organizations.

When creating test/dev data, PAS keeps modified blocks separate from backup copies. Backup
copies are available to developers in read-only versions but changes are not kept on the main
copy.

Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh said the vendor’s goal is to virtualize and manage copies of data to
facilitate data protection.

“There are two types of data -- production data and copy data,” Ashutosh said. “We’re trying to
position Actifio simply as copy data management.”

PAS appliances come in two versions, one supports 64 TB of pre-deduped data and another supports
127 TB of data. Actifio licenses PAS according to the amount of application data managed, beginning
at $70,000 for 10 TB of application data. Ashutosh said Actifio had about 70 customers for PAS. The
new version will be available next week.

Garnter analyst Dave Russell said Actifio can drive down the amount of products required for
traditional backup, DR and other data protection processes. “The idea of getting data once and
repurposing it for multiple use cases sounds compelling,” he said. “The end game is very
disruptive. Other vendors sell a variety of solutions. You have to buy backup software, a dedicated
backup appliance and something else for DR. You have three or four different products. They do that
through one code and set of policies.”

John Meyers, assistant director of medicine and director of technology for medicine at the
Boston University School of Medicine, said he installed three PAS appliances last September after a
storage overhaul. Meyers said his department went from having data on “servers sitting under
people’s lab benches, off-the-shelf NAS devices and portable hard drives” to an EMC Isilon NAS and
Hewlett-Packard 3PAR SAN. After the overhaul, he sought the best way to protect his data.

“We’re a heterogeneous environment with stand-alone servers, blade servers, a SAN and a giant
NAS,” he said. “If I didn’t go with Actifio, I would have had to buy replication targets for all of
that, another 3PAR, another Isilon and at least three backup products. It would’ve cost about a
million dollars in hardware.”

Meyers said he is looking forward to the improved dedupe and multi-tenancy in version 5, and
will likely use the Dedupe Async Replication as his department expands its clinical data
center.

He said the deduplication will help him better deal with hundreds of terabytes of data, while
the multi-tenancy will come in handy as his department begins offering backup services to other
groups inside the university.

“Having multi-tenancy is important in academia,” he said. “There are a lot of independent
departments that will use this technology.”

One potential red flag is that Actifio’s PAS appliances must sit in the data path to protect
certain applications. Meyers said he considered that a problem until he learned to trust the
product. He said he uses raw device
mapping (RDM) for his virtual machines, and routes them in-band through VMware vSphere while
running VMDKs
out-of-band.

“I swore originally I would never use Actifio in the data path,” he said. “But I found it gives
me flexibility. We have physical machines on it but we route physical RDMs through VMware. After I
got used to it, I started to trust it more. You can have hybrid configurations.”